PRINT INTERVIEWS AND MENTIONS (Selected)
The Moscow Times
September 26, 2000
U.S. Sues Harvard For Work In Russia. (Excerpt)
Sarah Karush
"Janine Wedel, author of a book on Western aid to post-communist Eastern Europe, which devotes almost an entire chapter to the Harvard project, said by telephone from Pittsburgh on Tuesday that both the U.S. and Russian sides needed to further examine alleged corruption during the attempts at economic reform in the 1990s.
On the U.S. side, Treasury officials were responsible for the allocation of resources and were connected to the defendants, she said.
"Russians need to ask how did they allow policy to be dictated by a small clan, notably the Chubais clan, with huge input from U.S. Treasury officials and those connected with them?" Wedel said."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
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The Moscow Times
November 30, 2000
U.S. Professor Wins $200,000 For Research Into Western Aid.
Valeria Korchagina
An American anthropologist who has spent more than a decade assembling research critical of U.S. foreign aid to Russia and Eastern Europe has won a $200,000 academic prize for her work.
Janine Wedel, a professor with the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, was on Thursday to be awarded the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for 2001.
Wedel's work was chosen from among 51 nominations and represents groundbreaking research and writing on how the U.S. government, via the U.S. Agency for International Development, used aid money in the early and mid-1990s to support the programs and careers of Anatoly Chubais and his allies.
Writing in The Nation, an American weekly magazine, and also in her book "Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998," Wedel has also been a vocal critic of USAID's relationship with the Harvard Institute for International Development.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a legal suit in September against two principal scholars at Harvard University and their wives. The scholars were accused of gaining profits while being under a contract from USAID to provide economic and legal advice for privatization in Russia.
Wedel said in a telephone interview from Washington that she thought the problems in Russian-American foreign aid relationships that she had written of were far from unique.
"With the ongoing processes of globalization, the nationality of actors is becoming increasingly irrelevant," Wedel said. "And global elite who have more connections to one another and fewer to the nation state see themselves not as much as American or Russian, but as members of an exclusive club."
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The Moscow Times
June 3, 1997
What Went Wrong? (Excerpt)
Mark Whitehouse
"The Russian Privatization Center, a semi-private organization founded by presidential decree in November 1992 and financed by USAID, became a sort of clearing house for direct support to the reformers. Chubais, Vasilyev and ally Maxim Boiko all served on the board, according to a recent report by George Washington University professor Janine Wedel.
USAID's approach, Wedel says, concentrated too much power in the hands of the Chubais clan "at the expense of processes and institutions."
"By largely putting their eggs in one basket and allowing much aid to be used as the tool of one group, aid planners and politicians have alienated non-Western oriented reformers and opened themselves to suspicion and cynicism about aid programs, capitalism and the West," says Wedel.
The most blatant example of Russian politicians using USAID money for their own ends come during the advertising campaign for voucher privatization, which coincided with the 1993 campaign for parliamentary elections. According to Wedel, the slogan "Your voucher, your choice" in radio and television spots paid for by USAID was changed to "Your choice, Russia's Choice," a slogan for Chubais' political party."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
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The Moscow Times
April 5 , 2001
The U.S. Banker Who Would Be Kiselyov. (Excerpt)
Valeria Korchagina
"[Boris Jordan] also helped found Renaissance's Sputnik Fund, an investment vehicle still closely associated with Jordan that in its early stages managed to attract investors like financier George Soros and the Harvard Management Co., the endowment fund for Harvard University, Janine Wedel writes in her new book "Collision and Collusion."
Such close business ties no doubt enabled Soros and Harvard Management to become the only foreign investors permitted to participate in the notoriously famous loans-for-shares auctions of the mid-1990s, according to "Collision and Collusion."
Full text of the article available in PDF format.
